I’m really liking the rallying. The races themselves are good. Alejandra is still annoying but now sounds like she has a cold.
There are a lot of smallish bugs. Nothing game breaking that I have found so far, but annoying if you are trying to complete everything.
Some things I think would add to the game are to have more co-driver instructions, such as cut/don’t cut corners. Also to have a second set of instructions for each character that are spoken faster for when you have multiple instructions, as they do sound a little flat like they are not really there.
2 Likes
The aspect that brings me the most enjoyment in the new expansion is Horizon Open. It would be desirable if they periodically added new tracks to race on as an extension to the base map, say every six months. That way there’s always something new and exciting to look forward to.
2 Likes
What do I think about it? Well…
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The expansion looks just as good as the rest of FH5. This is one area where I’ve never had any complaints about the game. It’s very pretty.
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Gameplay-wise, I liked the idea of a rally-focused expansion, and it was cool to hear actual pace notes being called out in a Horizon game. (Unfortunately said pace notes are often being called out too late, at least for some of the co-drivers. You’d think this could possibly be tweaked in a patch.) I’m a bit more mixed on the rally format itself: obviously in rallying it’s you vs. the clock, without any immediate feedback from your competitors, but to be frank I don’t trust this game enough to give it the benefit of the doubt on my opponents’ times. There were difficulty spikes all over the place, especially on the tarmac courses: I’d win one or two races by seconds at a time, and then struggle mightily to get first place on another. The final nighttime race was particularly difficult. At least when you’re racing the AI directly, you can see when they’re getting some sort of BS cheats applied to them, but I have no idea if those times were actually being simulated or being pulled out of the game’s butt. Knowing the game the way I do, I suspect the latter.
One other thing I found interesting, for better or worse, is that even supercar-level street cars didn’t seem to have any real chance of winning on the tarmac courses. I tried them out once or twice for a change of pace and got absolutely destroyed. The courses are so twisty and rely so much on short bursts of acceleration that they pretty much demand a dedicated rally car, or at least a car tuned to rally specs. If it wasn’t in the Recommended list, it probably wasn’t going to be much good. That unfortunately limits the pool of cars that work well in the expansion, which is compounded by…
- Content: Right off the bat, the cars available with the expansion make very little sense. Over 90% of the map is comprised of rally-style road and dirt tracks, with only the desert area representing true offroad driving. So of course most of the cars provided to us are offroad beasts only suited for that remaining 10%. All the sense in the world, right? And I’m not even knocking the individual cars, most of them may be great for all I know, but they don’t fit with what the expansion was actually about. (Hell, we can extend that over to the three finale races, which each have exactly nothing to do with the type of racing that you did do unlock them.) The Focus we got is great, and the Quattro from right before the expansion is my baby, but the game as a whole doesn’t have a huge amount of dedicated rally cars, and this was a massive wasted opportunity. Where are more of the legendary Group B monsters, or some modern examples? Or maybe the glorious return of Lancia? As it stood, I wound up using the same 4 or 5 cars for almost the entire expansion, which was a real bummer.
As for the map, it has a nice variety of environments, but the whole thing feels a bit too small and cramped to me. I think a big part of it is the design of the roads. Obviously rally courses are going to be twisty by definition, but when driving around the map a lot of it felt kind of artificial in a way the main Mexico map never did. A good example is that one spot in the canyon where there’s a long straight stretch, followed by a tight hairpin, followed by another long straight about ten feet to the right of the first one. There’s no reason why any real road would be like that, and elements like that pulled me out of the experience a bit. I tend to prefer faster flowing roads to tight and twisty ones, so it doesn’t feel very fun for me to cruise around at random. I’ve already used a lot of fast travel, I think much more than I did on the Hot Wheels map, because getting from point A to point B can feel like more of a chore than it needs to be. Maybe that’s an unavoidable consequence of constructing an entire map out of rally stages. The compressed feel even extended to route discovery, which I completed far faster than it took on the Hot Wheels map. There just aren’t a huge amount of roads.
(Oh, and whatever developer sat there in cold blood and thought that the constant helicopter WHAPPAWHAPPAWHAPPA was a solid design choice should probably find a new career.)
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As for story…I mean, can we even call anything the Horizon games do “story” at this point? Having the three separate teams doesn’t make much sense when you can freely choose between all of their events after playing for an hour or so. It might have made the choice more meaningful if you were locked into each discipline until you completed its final race. I don’t mind Alex all that much, but Alejandra and Rami remain as cringeworthy as ever. As I said earlier, having the final races be these crazy cross-country romps makes no sense given that the rest of the content is purely rally-focused. At least the Goliath course was a decent mix of surfaces, even if it made no sense to race against the other car types.
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And finally, will I replay it? Well, that ties into what Not_Here_Too mentioned at the start, the mind-boggling stupid decision to force us poor FOMO saps through all of the main progression in a single week in order to win a lousy T-shirt. I mean I’ll probably come back to finish off the rest of the tasks, like I still need to do for the Hot Wheels map, and since I jumped through those hoops to unlock the weekly chorelist tasks I’ll do those too. But beyond that, I’m not so sure I’ll come back all that often. In the grand scheme of things there wasn’t a whole lot of content in this expansion, not even a separate story mode like the FH4 expansions and Hot Wheels had. You race each course once, and that alone gives you just about enough points to unlock the final races and the Goliath.
So at the end of the day, I think my rating is a resounding “eh, okay I guess.”
5 Likes
Since I completed everything in the expansion challenges, I’ve just been running some Rivals times for something to do & the more races I run, the smaller the map feels. I know there were reverse race courses but the additional number of circuits that have been integrated into other races has become significantly more apparent.
1 Like
I’ve started to notice a significant drop in players over the last several days when I’ve been on, so has the “Rally bubble” popped already? It was nice to see the short term return in activity in the game post release while it lasted.
I liked the Rally Adventure expansion.
- Map had plenty of interesting roads
- Campaign was nicely structured (if a little short)
- 1 or 2 good cars in the selection
- Rally effects (pace notes, helicopter etc.) were some nice window-dressing
- Horizon Open functions like the mainland (good) and not Hot Wheels (fully ghosted)
Would have liked for Horizon Open to have C and D as selectable classes though.
1 Like